May 6, 2012

Writes Michael Barone, noting that Elizabeth Warren asserts that she is "1-32nd Native American [and] George Zimmerman, the Florida accused murderer, had a black grandmother."

If we're doing plain old arithmetic here, Zimmerman is 8 times as black as Warren is Native American. (At the genetic level, it could be a lot more complex — were the identified ancestors 100%? — but that doesn't explain the error.)

I did the math in my head as I was reading the column, and then — despite the depressing innumeracy — I was completely cheered up, reading the comments and running into rhhardin, who is one of my all-time favorite commenters over here on the Althouse blog. With characteristic succinctness, he says:

"That makes Warren 1-32nd Native American. George Zimmerman, the Florida accused murderer, had a black grandmother. That makes him one-fourth black, four times as black as Warren is Indian"

Eight times.

ADDED: Fractions are hard. It's not so easy to use the calculator. You can turn 1/4 into decimal without straining, but 1/32 is tricky. But if you stop and struggle long enough to encounter your inner Barbie...

... and you feel a little queasy about doing math, maybe your queasiness will carry over into wondering what the hell are we doing calculating racial percentages! It really is quite disgusting.

“Martin Luther King dreamed of a day when men would be judged not on the color of their skin but on the content of their great-great-great-grandmother’s wedding license application. And now it’s here! . . . Just in case you’re having difficulty keeping up with all these Composite-Americans, George Zimmerman, the son of a Peruvian mestiza, is the embodiment of endemic white racism and the reincarnation of Bull Connor, but Elizabeth Warren, the great-great-great-granddaughter of someone who might possibly have been listed as Cherokee on an application for a marriage license, is a heartwarming testimony to how minorities are shattering the glass ceiling in Harvard Yard. George Zimmerman, redneck; Elizabeth Warren, redskin. Under the Third Reich’s Nuremberg Laws, Ms. Warren would have been classified as Aryan and Mr. Zimmerman as non-Aryan. Now it’s the other way round. Progress!”

It seems as if the re-election campaign is coinciding in an increase in the opportunity to mock the left.

And all of this horseshit revolves around our census. We're supposed to count people. What do we count? Races. The state divides us into races in order to measure us, compartmentalize us, divide us. The original census counted a slave as 60% of a person. Fun with fractions!

I don't know CF. What do you think? Is it likelier that Warren's great great great grandmother has less of a chance of being 100% Indian than Zimmerman's great grandfather does of being 100% African? (He was Afro Peruvian)

My point is, to say that Zimmerman is one quarter black as Barone does is just as disingenuous as what they accuse Warren of being.

Hallelujah! In the old racist America, we had quadroons and octoroons. But in the new post-racial America, we have — hang on, let me get out my calculator — duoettrigintaroons! Martin Luther King dreamed of a day when men would be judged not on the color of their skin but on the content of their great-great-great-grandmother’s wedding-license application. And now it’s here! You can read all about it in Elizabeth Warren’s memoir of her struggles to come to terms with her racial identity, "Dreams from My Great-Great-Great-Grandmother"...

Alas, the actual original marriage license does not list Great-Great-Great-Gran’ma as Cherokee, but let’s cut Elizabeth Fauxcahontas Crockagawea Warren some slack here. She couldn’t be black. She would if she could, but she couldn’t. But she could be 1/32nd Cherokee, and maybe get invited to a luncheon with others of her kind — “people who are like I am,” 31/32nds white, and they can all sit around celebrating their diversity together. She is a testament to America’s melting pot, composite pot, composting pot, whatever.

Just in case you’re having difficulty keeping up with all these Composite Americans, George Zimmerman, the son of a Peruvian mestiza, is the embodiment of endemic white racism and the reincarnation of Bull Connor, but Elizabeth Warren, the great-great-great-granddaughter of someone who might possibly have been listed as Cherokee on an application for a marriage license, is a heartwarming testimony to how minorities are shattering the glass ceiling in Harvard Yard. George Zimmerman, redneck; Elizabeth Warren, redskin. Under the Third Reich’s Nuremberg Laws, Ms. Warren would have been classified as Aryan and Mr. Zimmerman as non-Aryan. Now it’s the other way round. Progress!

I am not sure why anyone would have problems with the fractions. We are talking factors of two, which means that you just divide the numbers in half at every level. Just use long division. Thus (zeros are added to line things up):1/2 = .500001/4 = .50000/2 = .251/8 = .25000/2 = .1251/16 = .12500/2 = .06251/32 = .06250/2 = .031251/64 = .03125/2 = .015625, etc.

And, if you want percentages, just move the decimal places two places to the right - thus 1/32 = .03125 = 3.125%. If you are talking multiples of these fractions, just multiply the decimal fraction by the numerator. Thus, 31/32 = 31*.03125 = .96875, or as a percentage, 96.875%. (Which is the floor or minimum amount of white blood that Warren apparently has).

And, having a mother who had a bachelor's degree in mathematics, and her having an aunt who had a master's degree in mathematics, I find the idea that girls cannot do math as insulting to girls and woman alike.

Yeah, but is Zimmerman authentically black? And more to the point, is he down for the struggle?

George Zimmerman reportedly spent many hours last year attempting to rouse the Afro-American community in support of a black homeless man, Sherman Ware, who was shot by Sanford, FL, police on December 4, 2010 — by placing fliers on cars at black churches, handing them out to departing congregations, and helping organize a meeting at Sanford City Hall that occurred on January 8, 2011. Is that “struggle” enough?

But mentioning that would conflict with the “white racist” narrative that the mainstream media has been determined to invoke.

In the last couple of years as a result of the decipherment of the Neanderthal genome and comparison with modern human genomes from around the world, it's been discovered that our human (Homo sapiens) ancestors as they originally departed Africa around 50,000 years ago interbred with Neanderthals — and thus all modern, non- (sub-Saharan) African descended peoples are part Neanderthal.

The proportion of Neanderthal ancestry in (non-African) folk today (approximately 2.5 ± 0.6%) is roughly equivalent to one of your great-great-great-grandparents being full-blooded Neanderthal — which as it happens is basically just about the same proportion (1/32nd) as Elizabeth Warren claims American Indian ancestry.

Thus, we (non-Africans) should all be able to claim minority Neanderthal status in applying to Harvard and elsewhere.

Racial purity is too important a concept to be discussed in the misleading (and, apparently, confusing) language of proportionality. On Wall Street, where precision matters, nobody talks about the ratios of yield on risky assets to the yield on Treasurys--they talk about the spread in terms of basis points. We should discuss racial differences in the same way, now that things like murder convictions and tenured professorships at Harvard are at stake. I propose a 0-100 scale of simple percentage points. It is easy and highly intuitive as a measure of what it is that we as a society are getting at here.

Zimmerman's 25-percent AA genetic mix gives him a 21.875-point margin of minoritiness (MoM) over Warren's paltry 3.125. (A simple and appealing extension of this basic metric would be to assign differential weights to each nonwhite group.)

Focusing on proportionality can induce huge errors such as Harvard's mistake in viewing Warren as infinitely more minority than the rest of its 0-MoM faculty.

...we (non-Africans) should all be able to claim minority Neanderthal status...

We at the University Affirmative Action Enforcement Office, with support from major news media, regret to inform you that Neanderthal is conventionally still descended from Homo Erectus, just as Homo Sapiens Sapiens is, therefore YOU are still a freakin' COUSIN BREEDIN' CRACKER!

This was inevitable once South Africa abandoned its state-mandated registries of racial heritage. Due to the law of Conservation of Stupidity, the system had to flow somewhere, and due to the then-prevalent worship (in the US) of All Things Foreign, it ended up here.You have to believe this, because the alternative is to believe that American policymakers are idiots (or evil), and I can't quite convince myself of that.

We at the University Affirmative Action Enforcement Office, with support from major news media, regret to inform you that Neanderthal is conventionally still descended from Homo Erectus, just as Homo Sapiens Sapiens is, therefore YOU are still a freakin' COUSIN BREEDIN' CRACKER!

LOL — that's right! Except that Homo erectus's descendant Neanderthal was only a “cousin” of ours in a very remote, separate species sense. Western racists can only be appalled by this news, as it implies that we (non Africans) interbred not just with separate races (shudder enough!) but (utter shock!) different non-human species! Way beyond that, the other significant consequence is that only (sub-Saharan) Africans among people today are pure-blooded human!

McNeil - "The proportion of Neanderthal ancestry in (non-African) folk today (approximately 2.5 ± 0.6%) is roughly equivalent to one of your great-great-great-grandparents being full-blooded Neanderthal — which as it happens is basically just about the same proportion (1/32nd) as Elizabeth Warren claims American Indian ancestry.

Thus, we (non-Africans) should all be able to claim minority Neanderthal status in applying to Harvard and elsewhere."==========================

Except for two things:

1. Most blacks in America have more than 1/32nd white blood so they can be at least two-fers under the racial bonus points system for Neanderthal minority status.

2. WHEN whites become a minority in America - as higher breeding rates of blacks and hispanics will make us in under 40 years, progressives, liberals will claim that blacks and hispanics are ALSO "minority white" and thus STILL entitled to more racial bonus points as double or triple minorities than mere minority whites can get.

The "Narrative" will remain unchanged. Unless we purge the assholes that unleashed this cancer on America after the Nazis, South Africa, and the slave holding South went with peoples fates and opportunities being a reflection of race blood percentiles.

There should be a magical law that every pure blood be forced to produce a mudblood Then all people will be half muggle and half pure blood, and the magical world can go on without being side tracked by this ridiculous issue. Or maybe we should get a star machine and send everyone to get stars upon thars. Good grief.

As a Massachusetts native, I thought the 1/32nd Native American is what Warren claimed. People in the state have actually looked into her family history and have found no evidence to back this claim up.

It's hard to keep up with all of this, but I believe 1/32nd Native American was only what Warren claimed to be. I believe that after people looked into this claim they could find no evidence of her being Native American at all.

Michael McNeil wrote:George Zimmerman reportedly spent many hours last year attempting to rouse the Afro-American community in support of a black homeless man, Sherman Ware, who was shot by Sanford, FL, police on December 4, 2010 — by placing fliers on cars at black churches, handing them out to departing congregations, and helping organize a meeting at Sanford City Hall that occurred on January 8, 2011. Is that “struggle” enough?

As we said....racist! /sThe media was so set on the narrative of the angry white male shooting the black kid after stalking him on the street. Could they have picked a worse case to make with?

How many people in the black community put out fliers over this black homeless guy shot by the police?I wonder ow many people in the black community on the bandwagon for lynching this guy even recognize him as the guy that helped the black homeless guy.But in this case I guess its "what have you done for me lately?"

Elementary school math? Not hard. Believing Warren's obvious lie about her background? That's hard. Particularly after it's been so thoroughly debunked at Jacobsen's blog and pollysgranddaughter. A correction is in order, particularly given your smug tone.

I am part Melungeon, part Cherokee and part Celt (Scots & Irish and possible Welsh, haven't confirmed that yet). Do I win a prize for personal multicultralism? I wrote in Pict as my race on my census form, just to mess with them. But to comment on Ms. Jeantel's testimony, what I thought was a) if I lived in Miama, I would sue the school district for not teaching her to read & write cursive. They made her look dumb on the stand. b) what kind of parent lets their child talk to people that disrespectfully c) "cracka" isn't racist? and d) what the heck *does* wet grass sound like.